Americans are exceptionally good at coming up with euphemisms. Partly, I think, its because Americans are exceptionally gullible at believing euphemisms. We were born in speechifying and documentation, and we'll die by speechifying and documentation.

This is another reasons why news from the gutter keeps becoming important in American life. We can have all the official news organs, government agencies and Fox "News" telling lies and spinning wildly, but Poor Richard's Almanac/underground newspapers/blogs keep percolating up. When our institutions fail, we have a fallback position. You can't fool all the people all the time.

But I digress.

The NYT and other conservative media outlets are currently suffering from "intense justification syndrome", sometimes called "a double standard" and at other times called "lying".

Sphincter conservatives justify torture with the "ticking bomb" scenario: What if a city were about to be blown up. Think of the children!

Lakhdar Boumediene and others completely put lie to their fear mongering. The bomb doesn't tick for eight years. The right wing (of either party) simply doesn't believe that the American justice system can handle thugs and murderer. I have greater faith in America than the scardy cats. American values are stronger than our fears.

if the sole object of American policy was to avoid inflaming anti-American opinion which would put our troops in greater danger, then the Lakers would be prevented from winning a championship.

There was certainly a fairly major "Beat the Lakers!" undercurrent in the latest NBA championships. Presumably, some of that sentiment was shared by some Muslims. That's almost always the case in championships: Rivalries and home-team spirit put the "fanatic" in "fan".

Almost any important decision is controversial and some people will be indignant no matter what. Refusing to disclose prisoner abuse photos because some people will be even more mad at us is foolish. Glenn is making the point that such refusal is bad politics, which it certainly is. I'm attempting, in my own snarky way, to make the point that it's an incredibly weak excuse for a number of reasons, some of them darkly humorous.

I won't explain again, because it wouldn't be funny. Besides, I was rooting for the Magic.

Glenn, I fully agree that we should not have taken military action against Iran and that Giuliani/McCain/et al were saber rattling fools, playing to the GOP "base" of knee-jerk pseudo-patriots.

That having been said, I don't think you can speculate, "imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way". Presumably, any military action against Iran would have targeted against specific installations and civilian deaths would have been minimal. Whether such unilateral actions would have fanned the flame of Iran's knee-jerk pseudo-patriots or caused convulsions in the political system leading to reform is difficult to predict. Iran is a young country, with nearly a quarter of the population under 15. I'm not going to predict how teenagers will jump. Surely, any action on our part would have changed the political landscape and most likely for the worst, but you can't just assume thousands of reformers would be lying dead in the streets.

Presumably, any military action against Iran would have targeted against specific installations and civilian deaths would have been minimal.

You mean the way our military actions against Afghanistan and Iraq caused only "minimal" civilian damage? Or the way that Israel's actions in Lebanon and Gaza did the same?

Yes, Glenn, that's exactly what I mean (minus the sarcasm). All the actions you describe are infantry invasions, looking for non-existent WMDs or trying to rout out missile launching sites.

Bombing runs are an entirely different animal. The Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear plant in 1981 resulted in, apparently, no casualties. The nuclear fuel producing targets in present day Iran are well known and away from civilians.

Again, I think that bombing Iran was and is a bad idea, but to say such a limited military action would have caused thousands of civilian deaths and prevented the current pro-democratic movement is more than a little disingenuous.

Do you have any idea how many targets were being discussed in the standard Bomb Iran plan? Have any idea?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/nuke-fac.htm for a start, would be my presumption. And that was a 30-second Google search that you challenged me on. Another 30 seconds got me to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080703026.html , which also thinks bombing wouldn't work but does name targets. (This answers some other letter writers as well.)

I don't think either of these is definitive, but if I can find likely targets in minutes, better intelligence is likely to be even more specific. Heck, just ask KBR where they shipped the equipment to...

And since you don't know what their plan is (or would have been) either, it's presumptuous to throw that as an argument in your favor. What we can reasonably assume from a "bombing campaign" is that it wouldn't be an infantry assault.

The thinkprogress.org page you pointed to simply enforces the basic agreement between you and me: Bombing Iran would be a really bad idea. You can't use arguments that we both agree on to augment our disagreements.

You still haven't proven your case.